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Kamala Harris’s marketing campaign unveiled its coverage platform over the weekend because the vice-president prepares to tackle Donald Trump in Tuesday’s high-stakes presidential debate. For weeks, Republicans and pundits alike have knocked Harris as being mild on coverage since rising to the highest of the ticket, a criticism compounded by her preliminary bare-bones marketing campaign web site, which made no point out of her stances.
In a listing headed “A New Manner Ahead,” the marketing campaign has divided its points into varied areas of focus, together with the financial system, international coverage, and defending “elementary freedoms,” which embrace abortion rights and civil rights. Every coverage space includes a part on Challenge 2025, contrasting the Harris-Walz stance towards the Heritage Basis–backed plan Trump has tried to disavow. Because the marketing campaign pledges to maneuver towards a brand new period of politics, some ties to the Biden marketing campaign seem more durable to shake. Along with together with a number of the identical positions Harris held as vice-president, The New Republic stories, the coverage web page initially contained metadata that referenced reelecting Joe Biden, suggesting a number of the textual content was taken straight from the previous marketing campaign web site. (The references have since been eliminated.) Listed below are some highlights of Harris’s proposals.
Below her financial coverage, Harris requires the top of “subminimum wages for tipped staff and other people with disabilities” in what seems to be a brand new proposal. Below federal legislation, employers must pay their tipped staff solely $2.13 per hour so long as that quantity plus ideas equals the present federal minimal wage of $7.25. The vice-president can also be calling for elevating that minimal, although she didn’t specify a determine. And she or he desires to remove taxes on ideas, which Trump has additionally proposed and which economists are much less captivated with.
In Harris’s plan to deal with housing shortage, she is pushing for the development of three million rental models and houses in her first time period as president. She’s additionally promising to “present first-time homebuyers with as much as $25,000 to assist with their down funds, with extra beneficiant help for first-generation householders,” per the marketing campaign’s web site. Consultants have raised questions in regards to the feasibility of a few of these proposals, with one economist telling the Occasions that the brand new homebuyers’ help might lead to steeper competitors for an already restricted provide of housing.
Harris has made tackling excessive prices a key a part of her financial insurance policies in an try to tackle inflation, which is persistently close to the highest of voters’ considerations. As a part of her new platform, she’s backing a ban on company worth gouging on meals and groceries in addition to on price-fixing by company landlords, which she says contributes to extreme bills for the typical shopper and renter. Harris first raised these messages throughout an financial handle in Raleigh, North Carolina, in her first coverage speech since turning into the nominee. Trump has sought to tie Harris to rising prices, pointing to the present administration and “Bidenomics” as the explanation for People’ heftier payments. Although Harris hasn’t specified what her proposed price-gouging ban will entail, the previous president has claimed it should quantity to “SOVIET Fashion Value Controls.”
On health-care prices, the vice-president can also be promising to increase the $2,000 cap on out-of-pocket spending, in addition to the $35 cap on insulin, from seniors to all People.
Harris indicated help for “commonsense” Supreme Courtroom reforms with a view to handle the physique’s waning help from the American folks. Particularly, her marketing campaign famous, she backs “requiring Justices to adjust to ethics guidelines that different federal judges are certain by and imposing time period limits.”
Not talked about is the favored progressive place of accelerating the variety of justices on the Supreme Courtroom, also referred to as Courtroom-packing, which Harris beforehand expressed an openness towards throughout her 2020 presidential bid. She later prevented questions on the topic throughout a vice-presidential debate with Mike Pence.
A good portion of the Harris-Walz platform revolves across the laws Harris has vowed to move into legislation if elected president. Amongst these are the PRO Act, which expands labor protections, in addition to the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which protects the appropriate of public-sector staff to prepare and be a part of a union. She’s additionally promising to signal payments codifying Roe v. Wade and banning assault rifles.
Harris can also be vowing to signal the bipartisan border invoice that didn’t move in Congress earlier this yr after Republicans got here out in droves to oppose it. In her platform, the marketing campaign highlighted the laws’s funding of detection know-how to cease drug trafficking in addition to its addition of extra border brokers, an indication of how the Democratic Get together is making an attempt to adapt to the raging debate on immigration occurring among the many American citizens.
Nonetheless, these guarantees hinge on the Democratic Get together’s potential to retain and acquire seats in each chambers of Congress in November, a situation that’s removed from a given on this shut and contentious election cycle.
